20150708

Security is the degree of resistance to, or protection from, harm. It applies to any vulnerable and valuable asset, such as a person, dwelling, community, nation, or organization.

As noted by the Institute for Security and Open Methodologies (ISECOM) in the OSSTMM 3, security provides "a form of protection where a separation is created between the assets and the threat." These separations are generically called "controls," and sometimes include changes to the asset or the threat.

Perceived security compared to real security

Perception of security may be poorly mapped to measureable objective security. For example, the fear of earthquakes has been reported to be more common than the fear of slipping on the bathroom floor although the latter kills many more people than the former. Similarly, the perceived effectiveness of security measures is sometimes different from the actual security provided by those measures. The presence of security protections may even be taken for security itself. For example, two computer security programs could be interfering with each other and even cancelling each other's effect, while the owner believes s/he is getting double the protection.

Security theater is a critical term for deployment of measures primarily aimed at raising subjective security without a genuine or commensurate concern for the effects of that measure on objective security. For example, some consider the screening of airline passengers based on static databases to have been Security Theater and Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System to have created a decrease in objective security.

Perception of security can increase objective security when it affects or deters malicious behavior, as with visual signs of security protections, such as video surveillance, alarm systems in a home, or an anti-theft system in a car such as a vehicle tracking system or warning sign. Since some intruders will decide not to attempt to break into such areas or vehicles, there can actually be less damage to windows in addition to protection of valuable objects inside. Without such advertisement, an intruder might, for example, approach a car, break the window, and then flee in response to an alarm being triggered. Either way, perhaps the car itself and the objects inside aren't stolen, but with perceived security even the windows of the car have a lower chance of being damaged.

Categorizing security

There is an immense literature on the analysis and categorization of security. Part of the reason for this is that, in most security systems, the "weakest link in the chain" is the most important. The situation is asymmetric since the 'defender' must cover all points of attack while the attacker need only identify a single weak point upon which to concentrate.

Security concepts

Certain concepts recur throughout different fields of security:

Assurance - assurance is the level of guarantee that a security system will behave as expected
Countermeasure - a countermeasure is a way to stop a threat from triggering a risk event
Defense in depth - never rely on one single security measure alone
Risk - a risk is a possible event which could cause a loss
Threat - a threat is a method of triggering a risk event that is dangerous
Vulnerability - a weakness in a target that can potentially be exploited by a security threat
Exploit - a vulnerability that has been triggered by a threat - a risk of 1.0 (100%)

Home security

Home security is something applicable to all of us and involves the hardware in place on a property, and personal security practices. The hardware would be the doors, locks, alarm systems, lighting that is installed on your property. Personal security practices would be ensuring doors are locked, alarms activated, windows closed and many other routine tasks which act to prevent a burglary.

Computer security

Computer security, also known as cybersecurity or IT security, is security applied to computing devices such as computers and smartphones, as well as computer networks such as private and public networks, including the whole Internet. The field includes all five components: hardware, software, data, people, and procedures by which digital equipment, information and services are protected from unintended or unauthorized access, change or destruction, and is of growing importance due to the increasing reliance of computer systems in most societies. It includes physical security to prevent theft of equipment and information security to protect the data on that equipment. Those terms generally do not refer to physical security, but a common belief among computer security experts is that a physical security breach is one of the worst kinds of security breaches as it generally allows full access to both data and equipment.

Security management in organizations

In the corporate world, various aspects of security are historically addressed separately - notably by distinct and often noncommunicating departments for IT security, physical security, and fraud prevention. Today there is a greater recognition of the interconnected nature of security requirements, an approach variously known as holistic security, "all hazards" management, and other terms.

Inciting factors in the convergence of security disciplines include the development of digital video surveillance technologies (see Professional video over IP) and the digitization and networking of physical control systems (see SCADA). Greater interdisciplinary cooperation is further evidenced by the February 2005 creation of the Alliance for Enterprise Security Risk Management, a joint venture including leading associations in security (ASIS), information security (ISSA, the Information Systems Security Association), and IT audit (ISACA, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association).

In 2007 the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) released ISO 28000 - Security Management Systems for the supply chain. Although the title supply chain is included, this Standard specifies the requirements for a security management system, including those aspects critical to security assurance for any organisation or enterprise wishing to manage the security of the organisation and its activities. ISO 28000 is the foremost risk based security system and is suitable for managing both public and private regulatory security, customs and industry based security schemes and requirements.

Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff), and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).

Nmap was named “Security Product of the Year” by Linux Journal, Info World, LinuxQuestions.Org, and Codetalker Digest. It was even featured in twelve movies, including The Matrix Reloaded, Die Hard 4, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Nmap is ...

Flexible: Supports dozens of advanced techniques for mapping out networks filled with IP filters, firewalls, routers, and other obstacles. This includes many port scanning mechanisms (both TCP & UDP), OS detection, version detection, ping sweeps, and more. See the documentation page.

Powerful:

Nmap has been used to scan huge networks of literally hundreds of thousands of machines.

While Nmap offers a rich set of advanced features for power users, you can start out as simply as "nmap -v -A targethost". Both traditional command line and graphical (GUI) versions are available to suit your preference. Binaries are available for those who do not wish to compile Nmap from source.

Free:

The primary goals of the Nmap Project is to help make the Internet a little more secure and to provide administrators/auditors/hackers with an advanced tool for exploring their networks. Nmap is available for free download, and also comes with full source code that you may modify and redistribute under the terms of the license.

Well Documented:

Significant effort has been put into comprehensive and up-to-date man pages, whitepapers, tutorials, and even a whole book! Find them in multiple languages here.

Supported:

While Nmap comes with no warranty, it is well supported by a vibrant community of developers and users. Most of this interaction occurs on the Nmap mailing lists. Most bug reports and questions should be sent to the nmap-dev list, but only after you read the guidelines. We recommend that all users subscribe to the low-traffic nmap-hackers announcement list. You can also find Nmap on Facebook and Twitter. For real-time chat, join the #nmap channel on Freenode or EFNet.

Acclaimed:

Nmap has won numerous awards, including "Information Security Product of the Year" by Linux Journal, Info World and Codetalker Digest. It has been featured in hundreds of magazine articles, several movies, dozens of books, and one comic book series. Visit the press page for further details.

Popular:

Thousands of people download Nmap every day, and it is included with many operating systems (Redhat Linux, Debian Linux, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc). It is among the top ten (out of 30,000) programs at the Freshmeat.Net repository. This is important because it lends Nmap its vibrant development and user support communities.

The Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) was created and written by the founder of TrustedSec. It is an open-source Python-driven tool aimed at penetration testing around Social-Engineering. SET has been presented at large-scale conferences including Blackhat, DerbyCon, Defcon, and ShmooCon. With over two million downloads, SET is the standard for social-engineering penetration tests and supported heavily within the security community.

The Social-Engineer Toolkit has over 2 million downloads and is aimed at leveraging advanced technological attacks in a social-engineering type environment. TrustedSec believes that social-engineering is one of the hardest attacks to protect against and now one of the most prevalent. The toolkit has been featured in a number of books including the number one best seller in security books for 12 months since its release, “Metasploit: The Penetrations Tester’s Guide” written by TrustedSec’s founder as well as Devon Kearns, Jim O’Gorman, and Mati Aharoni.

The Metasploit Framework is released under a BSD-style license. See COPYING for more details. The latest version of this software is available from: https://metasploit.com Bug tracking and development information can be found at: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework New bugs and feature requests should be directed to: http://r-7.co/MSF-BUGv1 API documentation for writing modules can be found at: https://rapid7.github.io/metasploit-framework/api Questions and suggestions can be sent to: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/metasploit-hackers

Installing

Generally, you should use the free installer, which contains all of the dependencies and will get you up and running with a few clicks. See the Dev Environment Setup if you'd like to deal with dependencies on your own.

Using Metasploit

Metasploit can do all sorts of things. The first thing you'll want to do is start msfconsole, but after that, you'll probably be best served by reading Metasploit Unleashed, the great community resources, or the wiki.

Contributing

See the Dev Environment Setup guide on GitHub, which will walk you through the whole process from installing all the dependencies, to cloning the repository, and finally to submitting a pull request. For slightly more information, see Contributing.